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The Taxman Cometh

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, as you know, I’m from Cincinnati. Some people may think of it as just another city in Ohio, but there has been a lot of drama coming out of Cincinnati over the years. One of the stars of the savings and loan scandal of the ’80s, Charles Keating, used to lecture at the Catholic girls’ high school I went to. The lectures were not about finance but rather on the sinfulness of wearing shorts in the summertime. However, my point is that stuff happens in Cincinnati.

David Brooks: Have I ever mentioned the fascinating Fed study that correlated the shortness of women’s shorts with higher mortgage default rates? It was no coincidence that the vogue for Daisy Dukes immediately preceded the financial crisis.

O.K., I am completely making this up. I am merely trying to deflect attention away from my main association with Cincinnati. The Big Red Machine. The best baseball team of my lifetime (Bench, Rose, Perez, Foster, Morgan, etc.), which brought me much personal pain as a Mets fan.

Gail: Now my poor hometown is being castigated as the center of an I.R.S. scandal. Humble workers at the Cincinnati office targeted Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny when those groups applied for tax-exempt status. There’s no conceivable excuse for that. It was deeply, deeply wrong.

Photo

The John Weld Peck Federal Building in Cincinnati houses the main offices for the Internal Revenue Service in the city.Credit Al Behrman/Associated Press

David: Good news. It turns out the Washington office of the I.R.S. was also deeply involved in going after conservative groups. That’s a relief. I’ve spent the last few days asking myself this question: Is it possible that a group of people were doing something completely vicious and stupid without somebody in Washington being involved? Thankfully, that matter has been resolved.

Gail: Yeah, at least Cincinnati did not sin alone. It’s a pretty upright city. You’d have to figure it would need company. But Republicans quickly decided this was a plot on the part of the Obama administration, and I don’t buy that part at all. I’m not happy proclaiming that we’ve discovered a big, huge case of nonpartisan ineptitude, but that looks like the story.

David: I don’t know. Tuesday’s Washington Post story makes it clear that people in Washington were pretty well aware. There are two possibilities. Either they targeted Tea Party groups because there were suddenly so many of them, and they were unaware that this might look like a politically motivated assault, in which case they are more oblivious than your average pebble, or else they targeted them for political reasons. It is not hard to believe that people in the biggest tax agency feel some animosity toward the nation’s most virulently anti-tax people. You’d have to repeal human nature for this not to be the case.

Gail: I’m going for more oblivious than the average pebble. Sorry, Cincinnati.

David: By the way, can I just say that I’m amazed that this I.R.S. story is bigger news than the Justice Department’s assault on The Associated Press and its reporters? I regard that intrusion as a much more egregious assault on the Constitution. I say that not just as a journalist, but because it is classic Big Brother behavior, making it impossible for journalism to function. To me this is the biggest scandal of the year, and the I.R.S. scandal is more like midlevel thuggery.

Gail: I agree, and that one troubles me much, much more because unlike the I.R.S. scandal – and the raft of other alleged scandals in Washington – I do suspect that the administration was complicit in seizing the Associated Press records. This is the sort of thing it’s supported in the past. With strong Republican backing, I should add.

David: Both of these matters, of course, grow out of a culture of federal arrogance.

Gail: The A.P. record-poaching sprang from the mind-set that causes a president to lose all interest in the Bill of Rights once he’s responsible for protecting the nation’s security. I can understand that temptation, but the fact that even a former constitutional law professor is not immune is sort of disturbing.

But about the I.R.S. — both parties have taken advantage of the current law to form huge, tax-exempt fund-raising groups that are totally political. They’re interested in the tax-exempt status mainly because it protects them from having to reveal their donors. The most famous one is Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS but the Democrats have them, too. I would argue that the Democrats started theirs only in self-defense but you can feel free to ignore that part.

David: I would argue that both parties started theirs only in self-defense. In fact when Obama outraised McCain by zillions of dollars, that was self-defense too, because a pair of Martian Koch brothers could have invaded Earth at any moment and infused the G.O.P. with cash.

I guess I agree that campaign finance is a mess, but when the I.R.S. starts targeting their political opponents, as they did here, I would say that is a real scandal.

Gail: There are probably going to be a trillion Congressional hearings on this. It would be nice if just one committee looked at the question of overhauling those tax rules so political fund-raisers had to disclose their donors. But that’s probably too much to ask.

David: There are two ways to do oversight. There’s the Henry Waxman way, when you get targets in the witness chair and you just go after them with indignation flying. Then there’s the Tom Carper way. Carper is the senator from Delaware who is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. He gets himself deeply enmeshed in the management of his agency on a detailed basis, works hard to make sure it is decently run, and tries to head off scandal with constant minute oversight. I guess I prefer the Carper method.

Gail: I don’t argue with the desirability of the method, but Homeland Security generally tends toward nonpartisan. The Republican equivalent of Henry Waxman is Oversight chairman Darrell Issa, who is just flat-out terrible.

Now I’m envisioning a whole bunch of shrieking committee hearings that make it even more impossible for the I.R.S. to clamp down on political groups that disguise themselves as charities in order to let their big-bucks donors go incognito.

David: If they do it even-steven, I don’t see why they should have difficulty doing that. I mean, don’t you think you would’ve reacted differently if they had targeted women’s groups or gun-control groups or environmental groups?

Gail: I honestly still think I would have wanted the reforms to include the big-bucks players, which will never happen now.

It’s been a depressing few weeks on the political front, and this I.R.S. thing is going to make the next few even more so. The least they could have done was to leave poor Cincinnati out of it.